Tuesday, November 25, 2008

From the GAP FAQ: Q1. What is the connection between the Holocaust against the Jews, the lynching of blacks, and abortion?

Answer:

A1. At the time the Holocaust happened, were the Jews considered to be valuable human beings equal to Aryans? At the time blacks were lynched, were they considered deserving of the same rights as whites? Today, as abortion occurs, the unborn are considered inferior to the born. In each of these cases then, there is a vulnerable class of people targeted for killing.

Societies that commit and permit genocide begin the atrocities by dehumanizing the victim class, calling them non-persons, parasites, cockroaches, sub-human, animals, etc. In Germany, the Nazis made it lawful to kill Jews. In the United States, slave owners and racists made it lawful to enslave and even kill black people. In Canada, the Supreme Court has permitted the killing of the unborn throughout all nine months of pregnancy.

Although the atrocities are not identical, there is a strong similarity: huge numbers of dead victims who have been denied their personhood on the basis that they are a burden and/or have something that is useful to the rest of society.[i] Jews were considered responsible for the social ills in Germany, and yet the Nazis also considered this burden to be a benefit: the Jews had bodies that the Nazis used for medical experiments. Whites considered blacks useful for slave labour yet when they became a nuisance they would lynch them. And today in Canada, the unborn are often deemed a problem (unwanted, unplanned pregnancies) and yet society is now finding a supposed benefit from the burdensome group through embryonic stem cell research.